Monday, May 4, 2009

Face to Faith

Christians disillusioned with the churches should articulate an alternative, says Theo Hobson

The Guardian: May 2nd 2009Some of us who are Christian struggle to fit in to any bit of Christian culture. It all seems full of assumptions that we can't accept. Our difficulties are basically liberal: churches seem to gravitate to authoritarianism, and they seem unable to grasp that secular liberalism is a good thing. Most of us come from Anglicanism and have a vague sense that it ought to accommodate us: is it not the most famously liberal of churches? But we have to admit that it cannot accommodate us: its liberal tradition has weakened in recent decades, and seems beyond repair; perhaps it was never very deeply rooted. This is a difficult thing to admit, for it forces us to ask: where can we go? What is our identity?

What's bugging us? We dislike the fact that Christianity is assumed to take institutional form. If you are a Christian, the assumption is, then you will be in favour of policies that defend the interests of these institutions, the churches, which run Christian culture. This ties Christianity to illiberalism in a way we can't accept. Take the faith schools debate. The argument is between non-believers who want all state education to be secular, and Christians (and other believers), who want a strong faith-school sector. But some of us Christians are deeply uneasy about the way in which churches use education to bolster their power, and encourage phoney church attendance among pushy parents. This is horribly at odds with the sort of Christian culture we want to see.

More widely, we are uneasy about the entire debate about the place of religion in public life. The loudest voices, almost the only voices, seem to belong to atheists on one hand, and conservative church leaders on the other. This country used to have a strong liberal Protestant tradition, which kept Christianity in touch with secular liberalism. This has gone: people now face a starker choice of identity between "secular liberal" and "institutional Christian".

We want to see a new sort of Christian culture that is at ease with secular liberalism. We think the state ought to be secular, and ought to keep all religious institutionalism in close check (including in education). The survival of an established church is embarrassing to us: it makes Christianity seem reactionary, nostalgic for pre-modern politics. But of course the issue is wider than establishment. All churches itch for social control. And all churches need to make laws about what doctrines you're meant to believe, how to conduct "true" worship, and what sort of sex you're allowed. They want to nail Christ down with rules.

The conventional response to this is that such complaints are naive: the downside of institutionalism must just be suffered. It might not always be pretty, but Christianity needs an institutional basis, or it will just dissolve. This is obviously a weighty argument, but some of us, having weighed it up carefully, don't buy it. We think that institutionalism is an expression of the Gospel that betrays it. A new sort of Christian culture must be attempted, away from the churches.

Admittedly it is hard to say what this deregulated religious culture might look like. It will take the form of many "alternative worship" events - attempts to express and communicate Christianity that are not directed by institutions. We have faith that Christianity can reinvent itself in this free, even anarchic, way.

But the first step is simply to say: we exist. We are Christians who dissent from the illiberal effects of institutionalism; we are post-ecclesial, and pro-secular. We know that we are in a tiny minority. But instead of moping in the corner, ashamed of our failure to fit in, we must come out. I suggest we call ourselves "alternative Christians".

What do we want? We demand a new way of proclaiming Jesus Christ, one that feels authentic, contemporary. We hope that, by accepting the truth of secular freedom, Christianity can enter a new phase, in which communication with liberal people is possible, and new cultural forms emerge. Maybe, with such a new direction, this religion can recapture the imagination of the culture.

• Theo Hobson is author of Milton's Vision: the Birth of Christian Liberty